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Samsung and AMD announced in June 2019 that the two would team up to bring mobile GPUs to the Samsung Exynos chips, with Samsung System LSI (the Exynos division of Samsung Electronics) licensing AMD’s Radeon IP GPU as part of a multi-year agreement. Yesterday, during a presentation for the Exynos 2100, Samsung gave an update on the partnership. Samsung LSI President and CEO Dr Inyup Kang announced, “We are working with AMD and we will have a next generation mobile GPU in the next flagship.”
An AMD GPU is therefore coming soon, in the next “flagship”. Cool. There have been different interpretations on the Internet of what “flagship” means in this context. Does that mean the next flagship Samsung smartphone or the next flagship Exynos chip? Since Kang works at Samsung LSI, the Exynos division, we’re going to go with the interpretation that “product” means the next Exynos chipset, which should be released in a year. The other interpretation, that a new GPU would arrive this year on a Galaxy Note, Fold or whatever you want to interpret as a “flagship smartphone”, would be very unusual as it would mean killing the new Exynos 2100 less than a year later. the start.
Currently, Samsung is not throwing the full weight of the company behind its own SoC division, but is splitting global distribution between Exynos and Qualcomm, the Exynos division’s biggest SoC rival. International users have yet to see what the new Exynos 2100 looks like, but previously the Exynos versions of Samsung phones have been so disparaged that Samsung users have started a petition calling for Qualcomm SoCs to be sold instead on their territory. For the 2020 Galaxy S20, Samsung also pulled the Exynos SoC out of its South Korean home market, opting instead to ship an American-made Qualcomm chip, a move that would have “humiliated” the Exynos division.
Along with this deal with AMD, there are signs that Samsung could focus more on its Exynos SoCs. The motto of yesterday’s presentation was “Exynos is back”, which seems to indicate that Samsung is admitting things have been bad in the past. And today, at Domino’s Pizza, the division is totally sorry and is turning a new leaf. Last year the Exynos flagship was the ‘Exynos 990’, but this year the flagship has a new model number scheme, ‘Exynos 2100’, tying it apparently closer to Samsung’s flagship smartphone, the Galaxy. S21. Presumably, next year’s AMD-GPU-Packing Exynos will be the Exynos 2200 and debut in the Galaxy S22.
But will Samsung ship Exynos to the rest of the world?
But will all of this change Samsung’s SoC distribution plan? The problem with any Samsung Exynos news is that it doesn’t apply to around half of Samsung’s user base. Typically, the US, China, Japan, Latin America, and (recently) Korea get Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, while Europe, India, and the rest of the world get Exynos. Samsung has yet to indicate its intention to switch to Exynos everywhere, which would be a major upheaval in Samsung’s product line, manufacturing capabilities and the SoC market in general.
Meanwhile, a better GPU isn’t a great attack vector if Samsung is to go into SoC war with Qualcomm. Qualcomm’s strength lies in its modem technology and connectivity patents, and it has used its patent aggressively enough to monopolize the Android SoC market in countries like the United States. The two companies are the same when it comes to CPU technology; they both use out-of-the-box ARM templates. Today, Samsung uses out-of-the-box ARM Mali GPUs, while Qualcomm has its own graphics division called “Adreno”.
Interestingly, with the Samsung partnership, AMD’s graphics division will be the forerunner of two of the major GPU implementations in the mobile market. Qualcomm’s Adreno GPUs are the result of a marriage with ATI’s former mobile GPU division. Qualcomm and ATI teamed up to design Qualcomm’s first Adreno GPUs around 2006, and Qualcomm eventually bought out ATI’s “Imageon” mobile group, forming Qualcomm’s in-house GPU division. AMD’s graphics division comes from a subsequent purchase of the rest from ATI, giving us AMD Radeon. Today, you can still see a tribute to AMD’s GPU division in Qualcomm’s branding – “Adreno” is an anagram for “Radeon”.
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